Team Development
Going through some old files, and found this gem: a chart depicting "Tuckman's Stages of Team Development".
Unfortunately, I can't find the image credit because this is an old screenshot.
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@maddy-c4c
Team Development
Going through some old files, and found this gem: a chart depicting "Tuckman's Stages of Team Development".
Unfortunately, I can't find the image credit because this is an old screenshot.
Musings from last week about how data infrastructure is a lot less visible, yet carries a lot more decisions, effort, and influence on the software that relies on it (the frontend / API layer).
Code for Canada Fellowship Snapshot – Maddy, Mike, and Andrea May ‘19 – Month 0 Onboarding brings us together in Toronto. We dive into government structure, inclusive design, and start digging into the problem space of federal government business travel through a design sprint. June ‘19 – Mont...
It’s hard to believe, but it’s our last week. It’s week 40.
As I realized how close we were coming to the end of the fellowship, I took a look back over the past ten months.
We’ve done a lot: countless hours of user interviews, talked with 50+ users, synthesized insights that led to key concept prototypes that have influenced the future of business travel within the federal government, and we spun up technical explorations that have opened conversations around how we can improve and build a more robust and flexible software ecosystem.
I’m extremely proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish.
Thank you to my team, Andrea and Mike. They’ve been incredible partners throughout this process.
Thank you to our government partners for bringing us on board, taking flight, and for their support along the way.
Introducing agile practices to a non-development team
Week 34 | February 10–14, 2020
Today, I wanted to share a little bit about my team’s journey of introducing agile rituals and practices to a non-development team. A couple weeks ago, we had a productive and meaningful team retrospective with our government partners. We were really moving in sync as a whole team.
I have spent the last seven, going on eight, years on various development and technical teams from small itty-bitty startups to large hardware corporations. The fellowship has been a new, interesting challenge for me personally. I have a technical background (engineer turned product manager), and for the first time, joined a team that wasn’t majority engineers.
So, it wasn’t without some bumps along the road to finally find a pattern of agile rituals that did work for us.
Week 33: Face what isn’t working (aka learn!)
Week 33 | February 3–7, 2020
Experimentation with Self-Service Booking
I’ve mentioned the experimental pilot we’re running a couple of times now.
Our goal is to “make it easier for travellers and travel support to book travel using the booking services of their choice, while still complying with Government of Canada travel directives.”
Our hypothesis is by allowing travellers and travel support to book their own travel, we can reduce errors, save time, and even save money, and hopefully public servants can feel empowered, with more flexibility and autonomy.
Week 30, 31, 32
Week 30, 31, 32 | January 13–31
Whew, so, we’re behind on blogging. It’s been a busy few weeks around here.
Instead of sharing details week over week, I thought I’d give a high level recap/share the highlights.
Transition
Our fellowship ends March 27th. It feels too soon to be discussing off-boarding and handoff, but we want to be prepared. We need to ensure our partners are well supported after we depart -- across documentation, skills, and knowledge sharing. We’re figuring out how we can support the team, and properly document and hand off our prototypes, service blueprints, and other work.
A lot of the heavy lifting is making sure the prototypes we have developed are framed correctly, and we identify an owner after we’re gone.
Self-Service Booking Experiments
With a small group of participants, we’re running an experiment where travellers are booking without a centralized tool. The past few weeks have allowed us to create clarity for the participants in what’s expected of them.
We’ve also had check-ins to stay updated, get their feedback, and learn about their experience trying to book without a centralized software tool. We’re digging into issues they might run into, like flight cancellations/changes (What happens if my flight gets cancelled? What if I’m travelling to a business meeting and the meeting gets cancelled?), payment (How will I pay for my flight, train, bus, etc.?), and “unhappy path” situations.
Retreat
We had the opportunity to come together with our fellowship cohort in mid-January. We reconnected, reflected, and discussed stories that we can tell when we look back on our fellowship.
Caption: A team that washes up together... does great work together?
Alt Caption: Man and two women stand beside each other facing a mirror. Man is wiping his hands with a paper towel, the two women are posing, one woman takes a picture into the mirror.
Service Blueprinting
Andrea has been deeply involved in the design of service blueprints, which will be a part of providing recommendations for the future GC travel experience. We’ve done many iterations of blueprints, and are digging deeper into new, specific areas -- like getting approval.
Prototypes
Ongoing development, incorporating feedback from users and feature suggestions from stakeholders.
Caption: Mike on Mike
Alternate Caption: Man stands beside a television screen presenting a slide with a picture of himself with a concerned expression, eyebrows raised.
Week 24: Organizing experimentation + brainstorming
Week 24 | December 2 – 6, 2019
Date of writing this blog | December 20, 2019
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I’m a little behind on writing this. It’s been a busy few weeks here: lots of productive meetings, Andrea has been head’s down on design and service blueprints, Mike has been at a conference and building prototypes, I’ve been organizing a dedicated test group that we’re experimenting with and supporting Andrea in meeting with folks across finance, managers, travellers, and different organizations to further understand how travel and finance are related.
But… back to week 24!
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Monday through Wednesday were largely organizational days for me: lots of emails and preparing for a kickoff meeting. Exploring opportunities to experiment with other organizations to put a couple ideas -- for example, what would business travel look like without a centralized booking tool? -- to the test.
We often hear that the regions feel left out since they’re away from the National Capital Region (NCR). We’re also interested in how the process of an organization that is based outside of the NCR might differ from one that is here, so we’re talking with a regional organization to experiment with them and do user research.
On Wednesday, we escaped from rooms with our government partners for a holiday celebration!
Source: https://www.facebook.com/EscapeManorOttawa/photos/a.980275122331391/984027048622865/?type=3&theater
On Thursday, Andrea led us through a really interesting activity. Since we’re exploring what decentralized booking for travellers looks like, we started by brainstorming the benefits of a centralized booking tool. Then we ideated around how we could provide those benefits without having a centralized booking tool.
Some of the benefits we brainstormed of a centralized booking tool are:
Reporting -- collect and centralize data for insights and to negotiate with vendors
Simplicity -- e.g. stored preferences and payment cards, aggregated options
Surfacing policy/rules and giving travellers flexibility in cancellation and rebooking
Directly ties into expenses
Based on that foundation, we ideated how we could solve for those in a world where booking is decentralized (i.e. where people can use the services of their choice, e.g. Google Flights, Kayak, Expedia):
*Disclaimer that these are just some of the ideas we had, and are just ideas!*
Offer a non-mandated booking option
Open APIs for profile information
Give travellers a recommended itinerary
A travel guidebook with resources that link out to policy/rules
One travel manager who has all the expertise and can book for the traveller
On Friday, we were back to talking with users! We chatted with a public servant at Transport Canada (TC) for which travel is a big part of their job. They presented some really interesting insights into travelling to remote locations and in and around the northern territories of Canada. For example, unpredictable weather is a huge factor. They can be stuck in a remote location for days until the weather passes.
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Happy holidays & see you in the new decade!
– Maddy, Product Manager Fellow
Today we're at PSPC HQ chatting with Digital Services Branch execs. Talking prototyping & design sprints!
They want me to travel more than I do, but... it's painful. The estimating, the expensing. And being away from family.
A public servant
A week on the road is three weeks of paperwork in the office.
A public servant (who is on the road often for their work)
Week 22: We’re talking with users again!
Week 22 | Monday November 18 – Friday November 22
It’s pretty surreal to think that we’re rounding out week 22 of 40 embedded with our partners. That’s 55%, whew!
We made serious headway this week:
Talked with 6 travellers and travel arrangers. Mostly focused in the NCR, but some in other provinces as well.
IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING, SIGN UP HERE!
If you’re unable to access the GC Intranet at this time, please email me here, or DM me on Twitter here, and we can connect.
Made significant headway on organizing an upcoming pilot with a small test group, where we will be prototyping tools to test whether we can improve their travel experience if they had flexibility in where they booked their travel.
Opened the conversation with our comms team about how we can share our prototypes more widely.
Wrapped up the first version of a fully interactive, functional prototype that helps you put together a travel estimate.
Started getting feedback on the prototype to learn whether it satisfies user needs. (Does it help reduce the time to build an estimate? Does it reduce errors in the estimate?)
Got a local Postgres database set up to consolidate some large Excel files, and allow me to run SQL queries (my data bread and butter) on the historic travel data we have.
Developed a first draft of a current-state service blueprint.
Caption: Mike and Andrea discussing the travel estimate prototype.
Alternative caption: A woman with blonde hair and blue jacket stands holding coffee beside man with red jacket sitting in a chair. They are looking at a laptop computer hooked up to a monitor. They are in an office cubicle.
This week was heavily focused on the building and testing portions of our newly minted team slogan:
Learn & Build & Test & Repeat.
As a product manager, I’m stoked that we’re prototyping, seeking data to define success/failure of the prototypes, and getting feedback from real end users which is leading to… what is shaping up as a product backlog!
Another big turning point this week was changing our working style slightly. We’re shifting back to sprints -- but one week sprints! This will allow us to have really short, tight feedback loops from prototyping to getting feedback on it, and shifting direction based on the feedback very quickly before we invest any more time in a bad idea.
–Maddy, Product Manager
Week 19: (Design) Sprinting
Week 19 | October 28 – November 1
Our partners led us through a one week design sprint modelled after the Google Ventures sprint. Us fellows participated as part of the sprint team: the ones participating in all the activities and doing the work of sketching, deciding, prototyping, testing, and being a part of the conversations.
The goal of this week was to bring key stakeholders together in one room, and share our various backgrounds and expertise to quickly design and test a piece of the what the future GC travel service could be.
Source: https://medium.com/@virginiaraoul/the-ladder-the-gv-design-sprint-community-16687ed39c8c
During FWD50, Code for Canada held an open house. We gave a small update on our project!
Reach out for more info @madsewins @afhill @goosefuzz.
I spent the past 3 working days arranging my travel, and it was the most exhausting, demotivating process ever.
A public servant
Wow... I wouldn't have to keep track of all my receipts?
Prototype tester + traveller. This is in response to a prototype concept* where all expense items are managed as part of your credit card statement. This testing is part of design sprint week, where we’re looking blue sky, facilitated by the Google Ventures Design Sprint framework. *DISCLAIMER: This is a concept only!
Week 18: Prototyping + Meetups
Week 18 | October 21-25
Last week was full of prototypes, and connecting with folks outside of our team. It’s important that we network outside of our own world because, among other things, (1) there are exciting projects happening all over, with lots of great ideas and parallels that we learn from and draw into our own work, (2) input to our prototypes makes them better and we learn about bad ideas faster, and (3) we capture more, better cross-disciplinary considerations.
Prototypes
I continued to update the content of the “Travel Guidebook” concept based on the latest information from folks across the Government of Canada.
How might we help newer public servants navigate the travel journey from end-to-end?
Andrea and Mike worked on another prototype -- a “Travel Estimator” to assist travelers in putting together a budget estimate.
How might we help public servants be aware of established city rates and limits?
Meetups
We hosted our second office hours at the NAC!
https://twitter.com/madsewins/status/1186669339119947776
We were delighted to join the TCUX Meetup (Transport Canada User Experience). Thanks to Noah for the invite, and Andee for singing it from the rooftops! We had a great conversation about using prototypes to “show the thing,” have better conversations, and learn quickly.
https://twitter.com/andeepittmanux/status/1187462321754562561
We’re busy revving up for CanUX and FWD50. We’ll also be sharing more about our project at the Code for Canada Open House on November 6th. Join us!
Week 17: Prototypes, digging into data, and exploring different recruitment methods
Week 17 | October 15-18
Monday
Monday was a federal holiday here in Canada, so we took some time to re-energize and spend time with family and friends. I’m grateful for the four months we’ve spent with our partners so far, all the wonderful, dedicated, and inspiring folks I’ve met, and all the learnings shared by others.
Tuesday
Things are ramping up over the next few weeks! We’ll be at CanUX (Nov 1–3) and FWD50 (Nov 5–7). Our government partners are also running a weeklong design sprint that we’ll be participating in.
We wanted to carve out time to open our doors, and invite others to poke and prod at our ideas. In light of all the upcoming events, we decided to move our Office Hours UP to Tuesday October 22nd, 11am–3pm. Please join us at the NAC if you can!